As shocking as the number of recalls may seem, there have
still been fewer than 50 incidents involving the faulty batteries. Also,
companies like Hewlett-Packard have yet to announce recalls for its
Sony-manufactured batteries and has no plans to do so. The company is confident
in the safety of its battery packs and lithium-ion batteries as a whole.

Quite frankly, there really is no credible alternative to
lithium-ion technology at the moment. For all the talk of fuel cell technology,
which Toshiba recently
had on display, the infrastructure to make such technology viable for
consumers is not yet in place. eWeek
reports:

Moreover, although the
recalls have sparked moves by some in the PC industry to increase the care with
which lithium-ion cells are manufactured—one group is working to establish
universal cell manufacturing standards, for example—there appear to be few
lithium-ion alternatives on the horizon at the moment that don't involve
trade-offs in energy density, cost or both. Some options, such as zinc-silver
batteries, use entirely different chemistries, while others reformulate
lithium-ion designs by introducing new materials. Numerous manufacturers are
also designing fuel cells, which convert hydrogen into electricity. But none
are without challenges, ensuring that in the absence of a dark horse
replacement candidate, lithium-ion or some version of the chemistry is likely
to power notebooks for years to come.

So while we may not see an alternative to lithium-ion
technology take over in the near future, there are other ways to squeeze more
run time out of notebooks. The Mobile
PC Extended Battery Life (EBL) Working Group is collaborating to ensure
that business notebooks will be able to operate for eight hours on a charge by
the year 2008. The group is working to develop 72-watt hour batteries, 3-watt 14"
and 15" XGA LCD panels and dramatically reduce power requirements in
processor/chipset designs to achieve this goal.

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I totally agree - for me the only concern is safe, long-term storage of nuclear waste, which I think has been pretty well dealt with. I think the safety of nuclear power plants is also a solved problem. Nuclear power could help lessen our dependence on foreign energy sources, plus be good for the environment. Seems like a win-win to me.

Seems ironic to me that tree-huggers put the kibosh on nuclear power, and thus kept us on this insane course of burning oil, natural gas, and coal in the US.

Wikipedia states that 96% of nuclear waste is perfectly good Uranium, so if we were to recycle our nuclear waste, we would only have to worry about 1/25 of the nuclear waste about which we currently worry, and the longevity of the radioactivity would be far lower as well:

I am a environmentalist, and the fanaticists that virtually monopolize the usage of the term environmentalist would be against this in an instant, because if we do not do everything that they want us to do for the environment (which involves mass genocide so we stop "hurting" and ensure that there is no one left to care), they do not want us to do anything for it. It is ridiculous, but it is true.

At present prices there is only about 25-30 years of uranium. Of course as prices go up the supply increases.

The majority of reactors in the world are light water reactors that have a tendency to absorb neutrons, that is the main reason for the enrichment process. Heavy water reactors like the CANDU can use regular Uranium as fuel as well as enriched fuel since heavy water doesn't absorb neutrons as much. The "waste" from a regular light water reactor can be ground up and used to fuel a heavy water reactor, at least for a little while. This is being done in South Korea.

The Uranium left is usually non-radioactive. It's the U turned to Plutonium that is the radioactive part as well as the other radioactive components like Strontium. The really dangerous stuff is the Plutonium which is highly poisonous and long lived. Other radioactive fuel cycles would be Thorium, which can be transmutated into radioactive Uranium, which is way more abundant than U-235.
Breeder reactors would be necessary but no country has really developed the technology extensively. The closest would the Phoenix and Super-Phoenix in France used to accelerate the break down of nuclear waste.

Gas cooled reactors provide an interesting technology because the most proposed coolant is He. When irradiated, the isotopes are short lived and the radiation is, I think, Beta radiation.

Should nuclear fuel be recycled? Yes but internationally, there is fear of nuclear proliferation with the material. Also no one wants nuclear material moving through where they live. Lastly the cost of recycling the material is prohibitive.

As for fanaticists calling themselves environmentalists. Well I like to think of myself too as an environmentalist and I'm no fanatic but look at the fore front of the movement. For years they have been banging their heads against the wall trying to get stuff to happen and nothing happened for years. They really don't have a lot of power but the power of their voices and in the majority of cases they really don't win. Society and corporations have worked around them. What's their reward? It's definitely not a lot of bucks.

Also, environmentalists are comprised of many different opinions. I believe the Sierra club and a couple of the original Greenpeace members support nuclear power. They too are pragmatic enough to realize that consumption is not going down and that we need to statisfy a large number of stakeholders if anything we do is to succeed.

In the case of nuclear fission powerplants, yes, there's problems storing the waste material. But if the new type of nuclear fusion power plants does well (currently testing in France, multi-billion, multi-national program) then there would be less problems with nuclear waste (in case of ission, the uranium stayes active for a few hundred thousand years, while the fusion by-products only for 12 years). Hence a plus for going all-electric

They still do not have the technology to build a nuclear fusion power plant. All successful nuclear fusion reactions done in laboratories to date are unfeasible to do on a large scale. France is trying to develop nuclear fusion reactors, so it is investing heavily in the research that would make their development possible, but it is not yet possible to build one and nuclear fusion is not yet well enough known to say how you would build one definitively.

The ITER being built is supposed to be a break even energy plant. Even if it works, a working fusion reator is way off.

It is an international effort. It was suppose to be built in Southern Ontario, Canada due to production of deuterium and tritium but the Ontario gov't pulled out due to economic fears. Too bad but what can you do.

Hey, I don't think that's fair. The way we regulate the industry and how it developed put it in trouble.

You can't actual start paying off the costs of a nuclear power plant until it's completed. For a multi-billion dollar plant that takes years - well that's a lot of interest. The lead times have increased hugely, increasing the costs.

Many of the early plants were derived from military projects. Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace pushed nuclear reactors into the public probably way too soon with way too many design flaws. It was Admiral Rickover who oversaw the developement of navel reactors, who then oversaw Shippingport. Many reactors were created out of nationalism rather than economics or out of a sense of modernism for the utilities.

Presently, there are reactor designs today that have addressed a lot of the problems of the old reactors but those old reactors have 50-60 years of operational life. We inherited the problems that they have and they have seeped into the national idea of what nuclear power is all about and not just to the tree huggers but to almost everyone.

As for the insane course of burning fossil fuels, there's no one to blame but ourselves. The President of France said it simply "we have no oil, no gas, we have no choice" and went on a nuclear power plant expansion. The US on the other hand gave tax breaks for oil and gas developement, let cars have worse milage today than in the 70's and basically stuck it's collective head in the sand in the name of consumerism and keeping the status quo.

Ironically, it's more likely the tree huggers that are most likely to be the first takers of any new more efficient technology, usually paying a premium for it.

And lastly, I'm realizing that all of this has absolutely nothing to do with 24 hr laptops, so I'm outta here.